Flavia Faranda

Born in 1977 in Rome, she moved to Milan in 1990, graduating in History of Art at the University of Milan and in Photography at the European Institute of Design. She started working as assistant in photographic studios. She started her activity dealing with still life and portrait. Alongside her work, she is interested in theater photography and themes related to contemporary culture and social issues, as prison, sustainable mobility, gender identity, participating in collective and personal exhibitions: Le ciclofficine milanesi (2007) in European Week of Sustainable Mobility; Laboratorio Sogno di San Vittore Casa Morigi, (2009); Brazil: una foto per il futuro, Jannone Gallery in Milan; (R) EXISTENCE at the Corrente Foundation, curated by Roberto Mutti (2014); Città Visibili; Manifiesto Blanco Gallery, Milan (2016); Milan Photoweek 2017. Since 2017 she is working as videomaker.

www.flaviafaranda.it

Visible Cities

Taken in Milan, Catania, Siena and Ascoli, Flavia Faranda’s photos, exhibited for the first time in the ‘Visible Cities’ show, are not only the tale of a journey, but also an inner self-portrait. “Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.” Far from being mere recordings, the images are superimposed whilst being taken, using film segments as details, which go on to re-build places. The results are oneiric visions, almost epiphanies which, although anchored to reality through a thin thread, memory’s thread, build up a muffled, metaphysical imaginary, suspended in an enchanted time-space dimension.
The Invisible Cities, as Calvino describes them, therefore appear to become visible, present in the artist’s subconscious and communicated through photos that are not only, and not so much, descriptions of a location, but the emotional sharing of its perception, with its sounds, smells and silences.